Everyone is a bit shit here (including whoever came up with that title...). No one "won" anything here.
DoE wanted to use "emergency" measures to survey miner's energy use, which is likely outside of the scope of the original intent of such powers (which appears to be why the judge granted a temporary restraining order?).
The Bitcoin miner's claim the data release would cause "irreparable harm to their business..." If that's not an admission of guilt, then I don't know what is.
temporary restraining order?
It's just a type of pretrial injunction. You need to show that irreparable harm would come if the DOE did this. It's helpful to have the case look like you'd win. Since the judge already said that it looks like they'd win, he'd likely extend it all the way to the end of the trial.
Cryptobros and crypto miners are some of the most worthless people in the world. Just a waste of oxygen and resources.
keep mum about energy use
Whose mum?
There is a "Your mum" joke in there.
Your mum is so fat, that bitcoin miners litigated to keep abusing her power grid.
US headline
"keep mum"
There is one impostor among us
Probably ai generated
This is dumb but only because we don't worry about energy use any other time. Tons of places in my city keep all their lights on 24/7 unnecessarily, we all are sitting on a "useless" social media, video games and movies and music are all energy uses. I don't want the government to start limiting energy use on things it deems unimportant. Who gets to decide what counts? Just implement a carbon tax and energy use will go down if people don't want to pay. We don't need to police everyone's usage, we just need the cost to actually reflect the externalities.
We could just solve the problem the capitalist way and just charge businesses extra for their power usage. That'll get them to care.
I want to agree with you, but crypto mining is orders of magnitude more energy than the worst lazy energy leaks.
The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.
Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.
Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.
Somehow Ethereum 2 exists with Proof of Stake and everybody is still using Bitcoin. That tells me that nobody important (for this context) cares about wasted electricity.
It's more that noone cares about the actual use cases of crypto and are just using it as speculative gambling.
Bitcoin is the literal equivalent of a horse and carriage while cars exist. If any crypto survives it should be the proof of stake crypto not the badly designed bitcoin (noting of course, for its time it was amazingly innovative, just that it's no longer actually useful).
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
Bitcoin was never meant to be that, people were/are just idiots.
Monero on the other hand... Something made possible because Bitcoin came first.
FYI there's no such thing as "Ethereum 2." It's just called "Ethereum."
And you're right, every time these mainstream articles mention the power consumption of crypto, they never mention ETH. Weird.
Genuine question: If I use a cryptocurrency such as Monero for its privacy benefits (only for spending, not as an investment), am I indirectly making crypto mining more profitable and hurting the environment?
ps. I don't use any crypto yet.
Edit: actually I don't care that much about private money. What if I were to just use some crypto because it's convenient? Would that be bad?
There are so many things we interact with that hurt the environment that I wouldn’t take too much personal blame if I were you. The big time miners are the ones using the electricity, and they could use their profits to invest in renewable sources for their mining. They just don’t do it, much like how every other company in the world doesn’t take environmentalism seriously and just says “you first”.
The government needs to focus on making renewable energy investment a requirement for the biggest offenders. That is the only way we will force large scale change that actually matters.
[…] use roughly as much electricity as all of the nation’s home computers combined
Bitcoin mining also risks stressing out the power grid in Texas, a crypto hub in the US where the state’s grid operator has paid Riot more than $31 million in energy credits to curb its electricity use during heatwave-induced demand spikes. Bitcoin mining has also brought sputtering fossil fuel power plants back to life and raised electricity costs for some residents in New York.
It's clear why the survey is necessary.
Why did they make it an emergency survey in the first place? Is there no "normal" survey alternative?
With the continued adoption of electric cars and heat pumps, the energy grid needs to be expanded either way.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
